Whites and blacks have had a difficult time getting along. Whites have often treated blacks with condescension. Blacks sometimes look for acceptance and find it in the condescending-but-sometimes-innocent attitude of whites (e.g. “you’re so articulate! so well-spoken!”).

Blacks who do not get that kind of feedback dislike the appearance of weakness and prostration, the obviousness of the black person’s desire to be accepted by whites.

They feel that when talented blacks “jump ship” and live in a white culture, it deprives those “left behind” with positive role models.

You know what? In a society where people look at you funny (or don’t look at you at all) because of the color of your skin, I’d say it’s pretty F’ing hard to avoid thinking of yourself foremost as a “black” human being, not simply “a human being like anyone else.”

So, if events out of my control continually tell me “you are part of group X and that is different from me,” I think it is an eminently understandable response to say “OK, the X’s are going to have to stick together and help each other out, because the Y’s won’t give us an inch because we’re different from them.”

What really needs to happen is that everyone needs to chill the F out (whites and blacks all) and stop thinking of the other as different.

So in some ways through meandering logic I’ve come around to reaffirm anti-communitarianism. But my gripe is that this is most definitely not a “black problem.” If we are going to bemoan the “Black Value System,” let us also bemoan the white person crossing the street and avoiding all eye contact with the black person walking towards them on the sidewalk.

It is also just bloody hard.

See the problem in South Africa of identifying bright young kids from disadvantaged communities… Do you pluck them from their communities and send them to private schools, and then when they come home for holidays, they can not identify with parents who may be domestic workers and miners?

I am not saying that I don’t think they should be given the opportunities, but sometimes we have a deep affection for people who are in different `classes’ and it is a tough balancing act, and sometimes a choice rather than a balancing act.

Sometimes you are forced to turn your back on your community. Even if you don’t, you may be perceived to have done just that.

As a Stirnerite egoist and by temperament rather unsociable I’m averse to communitarianism. However, I do see some merit in it as a competitor with and bulwark against the large, distant, bureaucratic central authority.